Conventional search engines receive a search query from a user and execute a search against a global index. Such conventional search engines typically use one or more conventional methods for performing a search. For example, one known method, described in an article entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine,” by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, assigns a degree of importance to an article, such as a web page, based on the link structure of the web. The search results are often presented in a list format, comprising article identifiers and brief snippets about the articles in a web page that can be resized.
Often, a user mentally associates articles that the user accesses close in time, that comprise similar content, or that originate from similar sources. In conventional information retrieval systems, the user is often unable to retrieve the articles since the association between the articles that is of interest to the user may not be captured by the information retrieval system. For example, the conventional search engines are unlikely to capture the fact that a user has printed two articles in rapid succession.